


keds and tube socks

by rustykitchenscissors



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Vampire Slayer, Christianity, Class Differences, F/F, Fast Food, Harm to Animals, Judaism, Parent Death, Religion, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Rule 63, Tattoos, Training, Vampire Hunters, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-30
Updated: 2014-08-30
Packaged: 2018-02-15 11:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2227335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rustykitchenscissors/pseuds/rustykitchenscissors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That’s it, that’s the thing, what slid under her skin and into her blood the moment Birdie Colbert had her wounded-palms-up in her grasp. What she does no longer has to be a solitary operation, which means it must be real, a live and squirming corpse with follicles and birthmarks. She can never shut her eyes at night and tell herself it’s all just horror movie stuff ever again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	keds and tube socks

The first time she stick-and-pokes a cross into her skin, she's got a palace guard of skinny church candles burning around the bathtub and an old Green Day t-shirt's sliced-off sleeve clenched between her teeth. She sits on the fuzzy toilet lid with her legs spread and the needle awkward in her left hand. Out the little square window up high on the wall, the sky is blue Jell-O and starless. She can hear _Dateline_ on the TV in the living room, a cruise ship scandal. Blue Jell-O like a fantasy swimming pool; you jump in there in some kind of bikini calling itself island print and you sink and your whole body's sugar and rubber; blue Jell-O like the sun hasn't set yet quite all the way. The only swimming pool Josyah Rayanne Person's ever been in was at the Y in Fort Wayne the one time she visited her cousin Marie. Seven, seven-years-old and dived right in the deep end and almost drowned and came to laughing like a jackal as she coughed the wet out of her lungs. Now she’s seventeen and the night is a wet thing like that, closing in. She dips the needle in the ink and presses it to her bicep, and born from that new black place is her blood. 

Placement is important. The first goes on her noodly bicep and the second goes on the other bicep and the third goes between her shoulder blades—a painful stretch—and the fourth between her barely budded breasts, and a piece of the Lord’s prayer on her left thigh, now growing tight with hard-worked muscle, and on her right, one night when her hair’s all matted with sweat and scab, lip split and probably needing to be stitched, brain all blissed out on sleeplessness and adrenaline and pilfered beers, she etches a block-lettered “BITE ME.” A bad joke. A bad dare.

But at a school in a sweatshirt and jeans, Rayanne’s skin is clean as anything. Virginal band geek Jesus freak chic with a cross more appropriately placed on a silver chain around her vulnerable neck. She keeps her sleeves never rolled above the elbows and when boys in _Lord of the Rings_ t-shirts tell her bad jokes, she smiles big and crooked-toothed and serene but thinks _bite me bite me bite me I know so many things that you don’t._ She changes for gym in the bathroom and lets everyone think it’s because she’s embarrassed she still doesn’t wear a bra, but alone in the stall she crosses herself by tracing the ink and bites her tongue as she thumbs over the newest bruises on her hips, Great Lakes, and grips them hard between her fingers and grins.

Not that she doesn’t hate gym class. Dumb jocks reeking of  lemon Axe and semeny lust for each other’s steroid-pumped pecs ramming into each other with no finesse, all grabby puppy hands and yelling, “Yeah, get it!” every time a girl climbs a rope, stands up, sits down, or looks vaguely in the direction of a basketball. The oft-repeated indignity of The Electric Slide. The big holes in her sweatpants she can’t be bothered to patch up because who the hell cares about looking presentable for gym class.

Birdie Colbert cares about looking presentable for gym class. Birdie’s got the most square inches of leg in the room and she makes sure everyone knows it. Always, everywhere, but now most of all, her gray gym shorts hiked up as high as they’ll go, bright white sneakers showing off how tan she is even in the middle of February. She must scrub them Colgate-clean every night, kneeling on her jewel-encrusted kitchen floor and her perfect ponytail swinging in time with her pumping forearm. When they stretch to warm up, she goes deep into a lunge, back leg almost parallel to the ground, calf muscle jacked and totally tremble-free, her arms thrown out to the sides and eyes closed like she’s on a beach somewhere, listening to the rising tide and sipping a piña colada. Birdie Colbert, captain of the volleyball team and the iciest bitch Rayanne’s ever met.

It’s rope-climbing day, which Rayanne is amazing at. Give her anything remotely tall and vertical and she’ll shimmy right up it like she’s Peter Parker newly bit. The teacher blows her whistle to signal that they should line up where the ropes are and Birdie Colbert, striding like she’s the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, side-swipes Rayanne, almost tripping her with a kick in the ankle. Birdie pauses, turns around, and glares. “Excuse me, please,” she says like a mob boss threatening to take out a hit on Rayanne’s life, and Rayanne smiles at her sweetly before lifting one knock-off Converse high-top and leaving an enormous streak of dirt on her sneaker’s snowy tennis toe.

Everyone in their third grade class was invited to Birdie’s eighth birthday party except Rayanne. It was a Wonder Woman party. Rayanne doesn’t forgive and she doesn’t forget.

 

 

Saying that Rayanne knew her dad would be like saying she knew the raccoon that nested in their rain gutters the summer she was six. Neatly trimmed sideburns and a couple of tall tales are all she ever had of him and all she ever will. And her momma did much better without him if the way the neighbors talked was any indication, drawling to one another over heads of romaine at the Lucky’s about how Annie Person had used to look so _sickly_ , always sound so _haggard._ Rayanne, when she wasn’t even four feet tall, would catch them and do her best job standing en pointe to glareuntil they saw her and shook their heads.

That was all her dad meant to anyone, bored disapproval. Until dogs all up and down the street started turning up dead. It wasn’t two neat puncture holes per neck, but guts and throats spilling like gold from a treasure chest, mandibles cracked messily apart. Everyone just figured it was some wild animal, some dog from two neighborhoods over with a bad case of rabies, some bear loose from a zoo and some zookeeper tryna keep it covered up, but no animal raised in domesticity was like this, so vicious and so methodical at the same time. People started locking up their dogs at night and begging animal control to patrol the block.

Rayanne had never had a dog of her own, just a rotating cast of mutts with country star doe eyes and matted fur that she liked to wrestle with in the yard, and throw real bones to and name after post-structuralist philosophers. After the first spate of killings, she found herself chanting, “Deleuze is loose,” all day at school, under her breath like praying, and when she went home she searched for the little gray ovine asshole in every imperfectly manicured rosebush and dead dog’s red-painted doghouse. Deleuze was nowhere; Deleuze stayed loose.

When she woke up, it was in blood on her bedroom window:  _hey there darlin. long time no rip your guts out._

And she got up. And she went to school. And she hid in the bathroom and cried. But it turned out it wasn’t Deleuze’s blood. Someone else’s dog, someone else’s sad story. The man with the Joaquin Phoenix beard slithered his way into the house one night pretending to be an electrician while her momma was at work, and the next thing she knew he was on her, and the next thing he knew Deleuze was on him, jaw wrapped full around his arm.

She was sixteen and shaking. She hacked his head right off with the butcher knife clean as that anyway. When his body dissolved into a thick black sludge, she jumped back, thinking it might eat through her shoes like the green goopy aliens in the  _X-Files._ All it did was burble dumbly until she wiped it up with Mr. Clean.  _Kiddo,_ he’d called her, said her momma’s name in malediction. And, “Josyah, apple-of-my-eye-ah, that’s what I used to—” as she was slicing him down to the bone.

 

 

When it’s hot out—when it’s just warm, too, but especially when it’s so summer-hot the air is holographic and she’s got to go lie in an ice-cold bath in the dark when she’s done—Rayanne likes to do her workouts outside. Sprints in circles around her block, does chin-ups on the thick oak back around her house, her white Beefy-T like being smothered in wet blankets but her sweaty face alive and grinning. Winter, though, she stays late at school. Three times a week, she hides out in the music room playing her clarinet, waiting for all clubs to end, then runs her laps through the abandoned hallways, radiators hissing after her like they’ve got fangs.

The floors are freshly mopped, squeaky on her sneakers, and all ethereal-angel-glow in the dusky sun. She listens to her own breathing, to her squeaking and her breathing, her squeaking and her breathing and that whistly way her hands slash through the air. This is good. This is her brain zooming out to get the whole big picture. She can feel it physically, like that little insect noise cameras make when their lenses retreat. Big hallway, broad thoughts. Slow gulp breaths. Movement all in her hips.

She’s rounding a corner when It happens. The beginning, the big downhill. There’s a thud, and then a grunt. A voice like a glitchy VHS asks, “Oh, you like to fight, girl?” and it’s coming from the gym, the gym; Rayanne goes running right into the gym without a weapon or a plan. She’s expecting to see a jock and a cheerleader maybe, or a jock and some quiet girl he’s been getting to do his homework (only the most desperate are willing to pay what Rayanne charges). Instead, it’s Birdie Colbert sprawled across a blue mat with a black eye and a split lip, knifing her leg up to kick the mangiest vampire Rayanne’s ever seen straight in the balls.

He howls and Birdie leaps up to grab the gymnast’s hoops above her head and wraps her legs around his veiny neck, squeezing, her shoulders looking ready to pop out as he twists violently at the new pressure. She shimmies a little—airborne—a bird—and strands of moonlight hair hang in her face, which is afraid. Birdie Colbert’s tryna strangle this dude with her volleyball-beefed thighs, but he hasn’t got an oxygen supply to cut off and the mat’s a couple inches too far back to catch her body when it inevitably falls. “You’re supposed to pass out,” Birdie whines, voice breaking, and the guy laughs and yanks back so the rings are set to swinging.

They’re so busy tangling, they haven’t noticed Rayanne. There’s a lot of things she could do right now—sneak up on them all stealthy and shit and press her cross-marked skin to where the bloodsucker’s grabbing at Birdie’s calf, hit him in the back of the head with a fire extinguisher—but what she does is scream. A horror movie damsel scream. Then she’s charging straight at them.

He startles, lets his grip on Birdie’s leg slip, and she takes that moment to unleash his neck and instead plant her clean white sneaker full in his face. Vampires, they’ve still got bones. Their noses can still break with a peanutty crunch. When he turns, hunched, he’s cupping his nose in his hands, but then he sees Rayanne, just a foot away, and he pulls his hands back. Says, “Hey, little missy.” Licks up his own nose blood. And she’s there, elbowing him where he’s already wounded, letting her bicep’s tattoo slide across his face as part of the motion. The ensuing burn should only have bought her a five second head start, maybe ten, except for a squish and a scream and Birdie Colbert grabbing Rayanne’s hand and running, her own other hand clutching a bloody pocket knife.

Rayanne gets with it fast, does a little rabbit jump and surges ahead so she’s practically dragging Birdie behind her, chanting, “Music room, vampire, music room, vampire.”

Long-legged and coming out of a daze, Birdie catches up so they’re running alongside each other but still holding slick sweaty hands, and between shuddering breaths—fast, they are fast, they are moving like Terminators or deer or Terminator deer with antlers made of guns—asks, “Bitch, what the hell are you saying?” but Rayanne, instead of answering, clams up and tries to see if they can go  _even faster_ . He was wearing athletic socks, no shoes, and Rayanne knows some vamps can run so silent he could already be about to snap their necks before they take another step.

The music room is as she left it. Half the fluorescent lights are burned out, the music staff on the board’s been freshly wiped clean of dick drawings, and her bag’s waiting on the piano, full of notebooks and crushed cigarette boxes and stakes and holy water. For now, though, she ignores it. She slams off the rest of the lights instead, checks out the door quick to make sure he’s not right there, and ducks into a closet, pulling Birdie after her.

“Bad sight,” she whispers, clamping a hand over Birdie’s mouth. “Good hearing.” In the dusty dark, their legs twisted uncomfortably around instrument cases, Rayanne and Birdie both try to steady their breathing. The top of Rayanne’s head hits below Birdie’s chin. She can feel the heartbeat hammering through her tank top and can almost hear it too, wishes she’d left a CD playing to cover it up. Birdie turns her head and the motion musses Rayanne’s hair. Rayanne feels dry and dead like a skeleton that has no hair at all. Her other hand goes to Birdie’s wrist, stroking over her pulse in some attempt to quiet, calm. There is nothing outside the closet yet. All is still except their bodies, flushed with adrenaline and flush against one another.

Then the voice, from almost just outside the music room door, calls, “I’m going to find you! I’m gonna make you slurp up the blood from the wound in my back!” and Rayanne can feel, on the skin of her palm, how Birdie sucks sharply in. But he doesn’t linger. He says, “I’m going to find you,” again and now he’s further down the hall and maybe they are saved. Still, they stay pressed together, Birdie’s knees to Rayanne’s thighs, and Birdie maneuvers the arm where Rayanne’s holding her wrist so now they’re holding hands again instead. It’s a contest to see who can leave the most nail marks.

Rayanne counts by heartbeats how long they stand there. Seven-hundred and ten times Birdie’s heart hyperventilates before Rayanne untangles their bodies, shushes Birdie with a finger to her own lips, and pushes open the door. He’s nowhere. She grabs up her bag from the piano, takes off her shoes, and makes the shushing motion one more time for emphasis. Then they’re out of there, soaring, forces of nature.

He doesn’t think it through, where he chooses to ambush them. Or doesn’t think it through as well as Rayanne would’ve. She prides herself on this, that no matter how much training she does, no matter how sick her body gets, what really gives her the advantage in this line of work is that she’s too damn smart for everyone else in this shithole town, alive or otherwise.

They’re right near the pool when he appears. The pool! Rayanne almost feels bad for him; he clearly has a second death wish. It’s a shitty, small pool, reserved special for the swim team, kept alive by annual vigorous fundraising by parents convinced their precious progeny are gonna be Olympians, and Rayanne, until this moment, knew it only by the stench of chlorine that met her every day on her way to math class.

He’s standing there, grinning, ready for his dinner, and she dashes abruptly through the door to the pool and Birdie dashes with her. And—yes, it’s full; for one moment her gut had dropped as she thought it maybe wouldn’t be, but there’s that mouth of water like a siren’s taunting tail in the dark. Rayanne drops her shoes and jumps into the shallow end. “What the fuck kind of escape route is this?” Birdie screams at her, but she jumps in after all the same.

Rayanne doesn’t bother answering, too busy digging in her bag. No time for fiddling around with the cap, she smashes a glass bottle of holy water against the pool wall as she hears the vampire stumbling around, trying to locate them. She shoves back to get as middle-of-the-pool as she can, and says calmly, “We’re over here, you plague-ridden sewer rat.” The hand she broke the glass with is warm and stinging with chlorine. She wonders if he can smell the blood. She wonders if this will really work the way she always imagined. A splash answers her first question. The high-pitched and undulating wail that follows answers her second.

His skin makes a noise like frying bacon.

Birdie swims up behind Rayanne and grabs her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here, Person,” she says, and Rayanne didn’t think Birdie Colbert even biologically could sound that small.

The sun is still up. That surprises Rayanne; it must have been hours they were waiting in that pool. Their clothes drip all over the hallway, out the door, into the parking lot, and then Rayanne remembers it’s below freezing outside and they go back in. It’s really a lot of blood. “You got it all over your face,” Birdie says when they’re kneeling by the lockers, checking the wounds to make sure they’re not life-threatening. “Don’t you win Miss American Hot Mess.” Her voice is clipped, tidy, but her makeup’s smeared to hell from ducking under the water. Rayanne reaches the bloody hand up to touch her mascara tracks, smirking, but Birdie bats her away. It hurts.

So she says, “Need bandages and iodine,” instead of  _think I’ve got competition._ Birdie just nods and gets up and disappears around a corner. Several moments of silence. Then the muffled sound of breaking glass.

When she comes back, her arms are full of bandages, a bag of cotton balls, an industrial-sized iodine bottle, little packets of crackers. “Nurse’s office needs a new window.” Kneeling back down, she dumps her ill-gotten goods on the floor and takes Rayanne’s hand into her lap. “You know, some of us know to wrap our skin up before smashing anything.”

“Yeah, sorry for saving your life and all.”

“What, from one of your meth head pals? I’d think it’s only your responsibility, don’t you?” Birdie uncaps the iodine, selects a cotton ball.

“That was a vampire, dipshit. And of course it’s my responsibility. Doesn’t make me not your new heroine. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be groveling right now.” Iodine. Iodine poured right on the wound, no cotton. Rayanne jerks her hand back. “Jesus fucking Christ, bitch.”

Birdie smirks and flicks her tattoo. “Taking the Lord’s name in vain,” she chides.

“Hey, the Lord knows I’ve got his back. And you’re Jewish.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re not concussed. For once in your life. Now give me your hand back. And say ‘vampire’ one more time.”

“Vampire vampire it was a fucking goddamn vampire.” Rayanne lolls her head back against the lockers, stretches out her arm for Birdie to grab. There’s a halo of pink around Birdie’s mouth; she was wearing lipstick to work out. How many times has Rayanne walked in on Birdie Colbert fixing her makeup in the bathroom? With her quick, efficient motions like she’s loading a gun. That pink-haloed mouth purses hard and Rayanne says, “Vampire,” again, and closes her eyes.

 

 

Turns out being captain of the volleyball team comes with the keys to the gym. “You think our esteemed coach bothers showing for practice more than forty percent of the time?” Batting her eyelashes in a mockery of something only she’s aware of, Birdie tosses the keys to Rayanne and Rayanne snatches them out of the air with one still-bandaged hand. It’s been three days and her lifelines and headlines and all that shit are knitting up nicely, but the sudden weight of the keys does still sting, if not any more than a needle.

She’s been nothing but nerves since that last fight, been strutting around her bedroom at night, throwing practice punches, instead of out on the streets where she belongs. There are no secrets anymore. That’s it, that’s the thing, what slid under her skin and into her blood the moment Birdie Colbert had her wounded-palms-up in her grasp. What she does no longer has to be a solitary operation, which means it must be real, a live and squirming corpse with follicles and birthmarks. She can never shut her eyes at night and tell herself it’s all just horror movie stuff ever again.

Not that that’s how she knew it was gonna go. The two of them had waited, loose shoulders and knees knocked together, on the floor of the hallway for Birdie’s ride. Her father would drop by for her on his way home from work, a nice man in a clean suit and a clean shave. A mouse ran from under one radiator to the other and Rayanne hummed a couple bars of “Candle in the Wind.” When she looked at Birdie, she saw locks. A face drawn private as a diary. Now that they’d stitched and wrapped and disinfected every loose end, Birdie was gonna go home, pluck the stray hairs from her eyebrows, lay perfectly centered in the fluffy pink donut of her bed, and let sleep make her once more into the untouchable princess she’s always been and always shall be amen.

But then there Birdie had been the next morning, shoving a Starbucks cup full of moon-pale coffee into Rayanne’s hand on her way into Calculus, saying, “Don’t fucking ice me out now,” before spinning around neat as a planet and stomping off down the hall. Scrawled beneath the green mermaid was a phone number and the words,  _I’m serious, bitch._

“Hit me.” Birdie swings and she blocks. “Hit me again.” Birdie swings and she ducks. “You know, I don’t really believe you’re trying to hit me right now.” One long leg lashes out and sweeps her off her feet, and she catches herself, palms down on the mat like a cat, and grins. “Good. A vampire thinks you’re gonna punch ’em, fuck that noise. You’re thinking ahead.”

“I’m just thinking you’re starting to annoy me right about now.”

“Yeah, and I’m not gonna be stopping any time soon, so use that.” She bounces as she talks, looking Birdie right in the eye. Then she jumps a little, jumps back and forth and side to side, dizzying. “Come on, girl. Come at me. Show me that tackle I taught you in the parking lot.” With a feral grin, Birdie cracks her neck, tightens her shoulders, and does.

 

 

For all her Ralph Lauren Polo and Ivy-League-educated private tutors and non-genetic Good Breeding, Birdie doesn’t have her own car. Rayanne laughs really big when she tells her. “Fuck, Bird, you even know how to drive?” They’ve been talking on the phone for an hour, Rayanne lying in bed with her knees bent to the ceiling, fingers knotting up the phone cord smaller and smaller like it’s her guts.

“Yeah,” Rayanne says, “I’ve got a truck. And yeah, in fact, it is a rusted falling-apart pick-up truck with truck nuts and a Jesus Loves Me bumper sticker, and when I drive it I wear my dykiest plaid flannel and trucker hat and wolf whistle at pretty blonde teenagers walking along the side of the road because their parents didn’t love them enough to sell one of their vacation homes to get them the little Sweet Sixteen Jaguars they rightfully deserved. We live in the fucking boondocks. You don’t know how to drive?”

Birdie scoffs into the receiver, pauses. “My parents, in their tireless efforts to instill in me an admirable work ethic, don’t want me to learn until I’m gainfully employed and can purchase a suitable starter vehicle myself.”

“Okay, new game plan: you hold the bloodsuckers still while I mug them. Maybe we can get you a cute scooter in a couple years.”

“Just. Come pick me up.” Birdie sounds like she’s pacing, that prancing pony rhythm in her voice she gets when she wants to punch something. Rayanne twists around to look at the clock on her nightstand; it’s six-o-clock exact and she can hear her momma in the kitchen, turning on the sink, putting a pot on the stove. If she goes to get Birdie now, she can maybe coax her into treating her to Burger King, and that’s one more serving of mac and cheese they can save for tomorrow night. “Ray, come on.” Like her jaw is clenched.

“Yeah, chill, I’ll be there. Take a breath. Take a nap. It’s all good, girl.” She hangs up before Birdie can respond. The light through her window is a grubby pink eraser, the interstice between safe and not safe. She finds her keys, her duffle, her cigarettes, her lighter, blows a kiss to the Avril Lavigne poster over her bed and gets the hell out of dodge.

When she finally pulls up to the literal mansion Birdie tries to pass off as a home, everything’s all dark and twinkly, the moon a fat fist, and through a golden gate Rayanne can see Birdie on the front steps, earphones in and head bobbing slowly. She’s princessy in a Girl Scout-green miniskirt and big fur collar, and when she notices Rayanne’s truck spitting and snarling like a wounded wolf, she raises her eyebrows.

Rayanne rolls down the passenger side window. “Get in the truck are you fucking serious.”

Birdie is serious, and Birdie saunters. She leans into the open window and the winter wind follows her inside. “I do believe I was promised truck nuts.”

Sudden as thunder, Rayanne lunges at her and bangs the door open, scraping her incisors over her bottom lip. But Birdie’s got reflexes, jumps the moment Rayanne does, and is out of the way of the door before it can knock her to the pavement. She regards Rayanne coolly. She pops out her earbuds and slides into the truck. She makes no noise closing the door behind her.  

But Rayanne’s hot-faced and itching all over. She wants an Angry Whopper with fries and a large Dr. Pepper and for Birdie, just for one moment, to feel as afraid as she does all the time. To understand the gravity of what they are doing, to move through the world like gravity exists. She leans across Birdie without looking at her to crank the window back up, so her breath won’t be frozen solid when she says, “Actually what the hell have you learned from me if it’s not ‘don’t just sit helpless outside after sunset like you’re not the latest dinner special on the senior senior  _senior_ menu at International House of Plasma’?” She’s still squished between the dashboard and Birdie, but meeting her eyes now, and this Amazonian asshole is fucking smirking at her, and okay, Rayanne doesn’t need a partner; Rayanne’s been getting by alone just fine since--   

Birdie puts her hand on Rayanne’s shoulder. Or kind of her shoulder, kind of her neck, middle finger brushing the top of the cross on her back. It’s a gentle hold. Birdie’s hands are all calluses. Birdie and Rayanne just stare at each other for a moment, and then, other hand meeting other shoulder, Birdie pushes Rayanne back into the driver’s seat. She pulls the fur collar over her head, unbuttons her coat, and tugs on the neck of her sweater to reveal her chest. Her bra is black, full-coverage and no-frills, and she reaches inside it and pulls out a handful of crumbling soil.

She says, “Learned to keep a lot more secrets.”

“Your bra is full of dirt? That’s your secret?”

“Consecrated dirt, from the garden at my synagogue.”

Rayanne nods and nods and keeps nodding with her whole body, dipping her fingers into Birdie’s dirty outstretched palm. “Well. No secrets from each other in this truck. We’re doing this, we’re doing this.”

“We’re doing this.”

Rayanne doesn’t so much laugh as say, “Hahaha,” but it’s the most genuinely happy sound she’s made in a long time, and Birdie flicks a comma of soil at the side of her face. “We’re doing this!” Rayanne yells, and gets the gold sunglasses her momma’s ex-boyfriend bought her at Graceland out of the glove compartment. She puts them on and sticks her tongue out at Birdie and steps on the gas, almost running over a woman cradling a teacup poodle in her arms.

Doing This it turns out, does include eating at Burger King. At the first stoplight they hit, Birdie’s stomach makes a trash compacter kind of noise and Rayanne cackles and U-turns so big they’re followed down the road by an entourage of angry honking. She doesn’t even have to say, once they’re there, “Your treat, since I’m saving your life every day now and whatnot.” Birdie just asks her what she wants and doesn’t complain that it’s too big an order and tells her to grab a corner table, “and make sure there aren’t any crumbs and ketchup stains and shit on it; I can’t eat with that.”

While Birdie picks genially at the toppings on her burger, separating them out and putting them back in differently, Rayanne near swallows hers whole and steals five of Birdie’s fries on top of that. Glowy-faced with cold and newness, Birdie’s humming. Something that might be Smashing Pumpkins. Rayanne gnaws on a fry and gets ketchup all over her lips and stares at Birdie’s breasts, waiting to be noticed.

“My fists are down here, Ray,” Birdie says without looking at her.

“I’m thinking really dirty thoughts.”

“You’re a fucking child.”

“I’m a fucking pun master. You’re the one with the mud pies stuffing your brassiere.”

A flash of white hand gold nails and the fry is snatched from between Rayanne’s teeth. “Tactical. It’s called being tactical. We don’t all plan to run hillbilly yelling at the vampires with our pitchforks and torches raised high.”

“Oh, so you’re the expert now?”

Birdie sticks her tongue out, narrows her eyes, is a dog with its prey in its sights. That confidence is dangerous; Rayanne has messy-stitched scars to prove. On the ride to the graveyard, she drills Birdie on kinds of kicks, which weapon which pocket, which weak point which weapon, which fuckup which dead girl on the ground at the end of it.

When they get out of the truck, all she can do is pray.

It goes like: a hand already grasping at the ground of the third grave they walk to, where the dirt smells sharp-new, grass all gone and the stone shining bright with the late local butcher’s name, rest in peace; Birdie taking the hand in her own and pulling hard, making like a midwife to the undead; a growl a growling louder the chillingest growl Rayanne ever heard, and—

Right down the butcher’s throat, Birdie sticks her whole hand full of bra dirt, and he screams, and he writhes, and Birdie gets only a little line of indents on her wrist and a black-stained fur collar to show for it.

“Nice, right?” she asks with her sparkling teeth all showing.

 

 

Birdie makes Rayanne think about wintergreen gum. Tell-tale signs of expensive orthodontia, glacial blue eyes and glossy blonde hair, big monstrous yetis living in the freezing mountain air. It makes perfect sense; don’t worry about it. Birdie’s wintergreen gum and a shock on her tongue every time.

First, first, it was all part of a movement, a falling through an exploded corpse and roll-tucking, and grabbing at Birdie’s hand and pulling her to the ground, and Birdie went to her knees, and her mouth went to Rayanne’s cheek. Tacky, the lipstick mark left purple as sleeplessness. And then there were Birdie’s hands on either side of her face, pulling her upward and into her, and Rayanne breathed out all sudden like she was the one coming to in a coffin, and it didn’t matter that their legs were in black undead sludge as  Birdie’s hands knitted into the short thick of Rayanne’s hair.

After, it’s every other moment. They fisticuffs and kiss, kickboxing and kiss, monster-killing and kiss, kiss when the last two in the locker room after gym class has been over for sixteen minutes and they’ve been lingering, Birdie slathering on deodorant extra slow. She finds Rayanne in the bathroom stall, knocking on the door polite as anything, and Rayanne digs her fingers into the newly bulging muscle of Birdie’s bicep, her cut hips, kissing, Birdie calling her a sinful little freak, kissing back.

It’s Rayanne’s fault really, when Birdie finally slips up.

“Let’s get milkshakes and listen to the jukebox, babe,” she says when she pulls up in front of Birdie’s house, Elvis shades on, hair gelled up and lipstick devil red.

“Don’t you have to get up early for pray around the flagpole?” Birdie slides in to the passenger seat like she lives in it. It’s March now, warm enough for a denim jacket and nudging at Rayanne with a pale bare knee.

“Canceled on account of Ms. Lalaine’s got bronchitis and also I’m getting sick of that schtick.” She bounces in her seat, grips Birdie’s knee. “Tuesday night. Date night. Milkshakes and the violent destruction of the undead species. Let’s get it on.”

Warm is hard to handle. Warm, soft, flowers budding, the desire to hold hands kindling in her lead-strong stomach when she sits at home listening to, yes, okay, Michelle Branch with the lights off and her head under a pillow. So she throws it out there, date night, and Birdie says, “Date night,” flat, and so who can blame Birdie for not having her head all the way in the game.

Tonight they’re doing the nearest dairy farm, been hearing about a spate of spooked cows and think there might be a ring nesting around there. “You know how common it is for cows to show up drained of blood in little backwater shit towns like this?” Birdie tilts her head, waiting, but Rayanne jabbers on without exact figures, swinging her flashlight around. “Fucked up. You think they could just tip ‘em like every other bored brain-dead delinquent waiting for their next high.”

It’s the usual strategy. They make a lot of noise—sending barbs back and forth, macking on each other, speculating on local legends, whining about math teachers who don’t respect their respective geniuses—until they’ve successfully rustled up a vamp or two to kick the shit out of. The strategy’s success hinges, however, on Birdie not reverting back to a tight-mouthed slick and shiny ice queen.

“Two little holes in the side of the neck too and yet people are too fucking dumb to know it’s vampires. They think it’s coyotes, mountain lions, chupacabras and alien abductions even, but who starts rubbing their cows down with garlic and making them do a hundred ‘Hail Mary’s? Not a single one of them.” Birdie just makes an mmming noise and Rayanne worries at her chipping navy nail polish with her teeth in response. After a moment of silence, hushed respect for every cow out there going through a paranormal time, she asks, “You all right, Bird?”

And Birdie turns around and throws her stake down at her feet. Probably not as dramatic as she was going for, but enough for Rayanne to raise her eyebrows. “You can’t just—You spring this on me, this idea that we’re. We’re, you know.”

Before she can think of her next word, her face is in manure. There’s no big strong monster looming over her in the dark, just a little farmer’s daughter kind of girl, twelve with Pippi Longstocking freckles-and-braids. But Pippi cackles to the tune of a knife being sharpened. Sticking out the pockets of her too-big jeans, a grouping of gathered bones. Not human, just little animal, serial killer in training. She moves like she’s not really there, glitchy, and her fragile body slams Rayanne’s in a flash.

What’s left of the waning moon lights up Birdie’s hair as she pushes herself from the muck. Coughing, sputtering, and Rayanne tastes it sympathetically thick on her tongue, the ripe burn of cow shit. She doesn’t take her eyes off Birdie, grabs at the glass bottles in her inner coat pocket. Smashed. That’s what their sharp ring of their bodies together had been. Her hand comes back out bleeding from the fingertips and Pippi’s nostrils flare.

“You been threatening your daddy’s cows, you little freak?”

Instead of answering, Pippi grips Birdie by the hair and stretches her torso back like making a table with your body in ballet class. Birdie writhes in the air, yelling Ray’s name with the voice of someone faithful she won’t be ignored.

Only one little girl versus two less little girls. Only rough denim stinging Rayanne’s fingertips where they search in her pocket for her best sharpened crucifix. Bubblegum wrappers and receipts and chapsticks roll together in a clump, stupid stupid stupid, and then there it is.

The thing about being a brilliant expert vampire hunter is you have to be the fastest. You have to run the fastest and think the fastest and move the fastest, faster than a robot cheetah on steroids and jet fuel. Faster than Danika Patrick. Sometimes, though, you slip up. Sometimes a cow moos in the distance and your hands stutter and a little dotty-faced girl pulls a bone with the edge carved into a shiv out of her pocket and stabs it into your girlfriend’s guts, and it doesn’t matter if a moment later you’re staking the little girl in the back with the power of the Lord, because you should have been a moment sooner. You should have been the fastest girlfriend there is.  

Getting Birdie to the truck takes a miracle amount of Mighty Mouse strength. Birdie calls her that, actually, “Mighty Mouse,” gasping, clasping her stomach so all her parts stay in.

“Don’t talk, you idiot,” Rayanne grunts. Birdie’s arm is draped over her shoulder. Birdie is getting laxer and heavier and the night seems to be getting darker and the mooing louder. Birdie nods and doesn’t talk anymore. It’s worse.

 

 

Their excuse at the hospital is that it was barbed wire. Trespassing seems a smaller and more regular-juvenile-delinquent-style crime than claiming that creatures of the night exist. It was barbed wire despite the shards of bone still buried in Birdie. It was barbed wire and yes she needs a new tetanus shot and they stick to that and that’s it.

Somehow, the girl missed all major organs. In three days, Birdie is out of the hospital. In three weeks, she’s back in school, walking stooped. Every time Rayanne tried to visit her at home, she was shut out by the Colberts, who didn’t want their daughter subjected to her filthy criminal influences, and maybe they were right. Rayanne stick and poked the word “failure” into her inner thigh and woke up with her face hot with regret.

Birdie didn’t call. Probably she was too busy sleeping it off. Probably she was too busy wondering how Birdie Colbert, Future Prom Queen, got mixed up with deadbeat trash.

They don’t get a chance to speak between classes; some other volleyball girl is carrying Birdie’s floral backpack for her as she hobbles from room to room. They don’t have the same lunch. It’s possible they’ll never speak again, that the rest of Rayanne’s high school career is gonna be the same starless night it was before Birdie showed up burning bright.

After school, she’s walking past Biology and a hand reaches out and yanks her into the room. It’s more exertion than Birdie should be exercising in her state, but Rayanne doesn’t say anything when her face comes into view.

“Date night,” Birdie says flatly. Her hair is coming out of its ponytail and Rayanne wants to tuck the strays behind her ear.

“Yeah, look, I’m sorry—”

“No.”

“No?”

Birdie shoots a glance at the other students in the hall. She backs up further into the unlit room, pulling Rayanne with her. “No.” She trails her fingers down the side of Rayanne’s face, her neck, thumb pausing to duck beneath the collar of Rayanne’s sweatshirt and trace circles on her bicep. “No. It was date night.”  

And Rayanne is grinning, jubilant, oblivious to the chemical smell of dissection-ready frogs, the mayor of everywhere good.

 

 

Candles cluster in gossipy huddles on the tables next to Rayanne’s bed, all other lights off and Taylor Swift playing softly. Birdie is shirtless in Rayanne’s bed, face-down with her head pillowed in her arms. Around her, Rayanne’s laid out her needles, ink, rubbing alcohol, gloves, pens. No patrolling tonight. Tonight they’re eating ice cream and watching dumb movies and being normal teenage girls and also this.

“What do you want, lady?” Rayanne asks her, considering the wide desert of Birdie’s back.

“Sunrise.”

“Like when the sun rises?”

“Yeah, like on a postcard.”

“Okay, this is black ink, you fucking bimbo; you can’t make a sunrise out of black ink.”

“Ray, I want an  _outline_ of a sunrise and if I don’t die from blood poisoning, I’ll get the colors filled in by someone who’s not an inbred hick wielding a glorified BIC pen and a death wish. Now make my back pretty.”

Rayanne pets a hand over Birdie’s skull, slips down to where her ponytail’s tied tight with an elastic the same color as her hair, and yanks the elastic out in one pull. Birdie’s leg jerks up, heel catching Rayanne hard just barely not in the kidney. “What are you—”

Tenderly, Rayanne teases the hair from its moussed-smooth rope until it pours, pale gold, over Birdie’s neck and shoulders and the top of her spine, an angel’s mane, an unleashing of light. “There,” she says. “That’s your sunrise,” and Birdie tilts her head back as far as it will go and covers her tired eyes with one hand, breathing deeply through her nose.   

“Ray.”

“Yep.”

“Give me a tattoo before I bust open your garlic-infested smartass mouth and bill you for the much-needed dental work.” But her voice is like she’s trying not to laugh.

“There might be a lot of blood.”

“Yeah, everything’s a lot of blood. We live with it.”

Rayanne sweeps the fall of hair back up out of her way, grabs the un-glorified actual BIC pen next to the needle, and tries to picture the precise shape of the sun breaking open against the trees last Friday morning, when she and Birdie lay spent on the roof of Rayanne’s garage, covered in scraped skin and graveyard dust and each other’s saliva and sore limbs, and Rayanne said solemnly, “For each sunrise and sunset opens up some new danger—some new pain,” and Birdie bit her gently on the hand.

“No Draculas,” she said when she took her teeth out.

“I vant to suck on your tits.”

“It’s almost time for school, Ray.” Her voice was soft and dense as fog. Hickeys purpled her neck the same shade as the bruising around her eye from some veiny dickhead’s fist, and no one but Rayanne would ever see either one not caked over with concealer.

“Let’s skip. Let’s sleep.”

“You’ve got a history test third period.”

“So let’s sleep until third period.” And they slumped into sleep right on the roof, and the sun grew to bathe their skin in safe, warm light, and when Ray woke up, Birdie was already awake and watching her, nose burnt red, her whole face relaxed and unafraid.


End file.
